The impact that GitHub has on your career
Over the next 12–24 months — in other words, between 2018 and 2019 — the method of hiring software developers will radically change.
From 2004 to 2014, I worked at Red Hat, the world's largest open source software company. On the very first day, in July 2004, my boss Marty Messer told me: “All the work that you will be doing here will be open, in full view. In the future, you will not need a resume - people will simply receive information about you on Google. ”
At the time, this was one of the unique features of working at Red Hat. We had the opportunity to create our own brand and reputation. Communication with other software developers was carried out using a mailing list and bug trackers, and the source code was administered through Mercurial, Subversion, and all cvs repositories were opened and indexed by Google.
Back in 2017: we now live in a world that is capturing open source software.
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There are two factors that will give you a real idea of today:
Software developers, especially those who work on closed source products, do not quite understand what is happening. For them, open source is equivalent to “free work in their free time.”
For those of us who have spent the last decade creating a billion-dollar open-source software company, there’s nothing wrong with working in the open. The benefits and significance of such work are obvious: your reputation is already known to other companies. GitHub is a social network where your social capital, created with the help of your commits and contributions to global communication in any IT field in which you work, belongs only to you - it is not tied to the company in which you happen to work for some time.
Smart people will be able to take advantage of this: they will post patches, send questions and leave comments to the creators of languages and frameworks that they use every day in their work - TypeScript, .NET, Redux.
They will also strongly support the idea and creatively organize the majority of their work in the field of open source development - even if this is only a contribution to the development of private repositories.
GitHub can be called a great equalizer. You may not be able to get a job in Australia from India, but nothing prevents you from working with Australians from India using GitHub.
The way to get a job in the same Red Hat over the past decade is obvious. You start working with Red Hat developers about the task they are working on at the moment, and then when it becomes clear that you have made a significant contribution and have been able to show your best in the process, you get a chance to talk about the possibility of further Employment. Well, or they will contact you.
Now the same path is open to all, almost in any direction. As the open source code takes over the world, this trend is spreading everywhere.
In a recent interview with Linus Torvalds (49 thousand subscribers, 0 GitHub subscriptions), the creator of Linux and Git, spoke about it this way:
Your reputation is your place in the circle of trust. The more often you change companies, the weaker your reputation becomes, and sometimes it even gets lost. It's like, if you live in a small town for quite a long time, all the inhabitants of this city know you. And if you move from country to country, you end up somewhere where no one knows you - and even worse, no one knows anyone who knows you.
You have lost your primary and secondary, and perhaps even third-level connections. Until you create a brand, speaking at conferences or doing other significant things, the trust that you have built up, working with others and putting the code in the corporate internal repository will not appear.
However, if this work was done on GitHub, then it will not disappear anywhere. She is visible. This is the way to enter the circle of trust, which is visible to all.
One of the first things that will happen is that those who were previously deprived of opportunities will begin to benefit from it. Students, college graduates, immigrants. They will use this to move to Australia.
And it will change the whole picture. The once privileged developers will find that their circle of trust is lost. One of the principles of open source is meritocracy - the best idea wins, the best commit, the best testing, the best implementation, etc.
Of course, this method of evaluation is also imperfect (and indeed there is nothing perfect). And he does not relieve you of the responsibility of being a good person to work with. We fired several stellar Red Hat developers who didn’t get along with other employees — and then we saw these guys collaborating with other contributors on GitHub.
GitHub is not just a code repository and a list of raw commits, as some stereotypically imagine it. This is a social network. I would formulate as follows:
This is something like a portable reputation. And over the next 12-24 months, while some developers will work on it, while others will not, this factor will become crucial. Let's draw an analogy. For example, there used to be dilemmas: have e-mail or not (now everyone has it), buy a mobile phone or not (now everyone has a mobile phone). In the end, the vast majority will work with open source, and this will become a situation in which everyone will have an equal chance of success.
But now the opportunity for a developer’s career growth will increasingly depend on GitHub.
From 2004 to 2014, I worked at Red Hat, the world's largest open source software company. On the very first day, in July 2004, my boss Marty Messer told me: “All the work that you will be doing here will be open, in full view. In the future, you will not need a resume - people will simply receive information about you on Google. ”
At the time, this was one of the unique features of working at Red Hat. We had the opportunity to create our own brand and reputation. Communication with other software developers was carried out using a mailing list and bug trackers, and the source code was administered through Mercurial, Subversion, and all cvs repositories were opened and indexed by Google.
Back in 2017: we now live in a world that is capturing open source software.
')
There are two factors that will give you a real idea of today:
- Microsoft, a long time proprietary example of proprietary software with closed source code and an active open source fighter, finally accepted the open-source software sincerely, creating the .NET Foundation (of which Red Hat, by the way, is a member) and joined the Linux Foundation. .NET is now being developed as an open source project.
- GitHub has become a special social network that links error tracking and version control.
Software developers, especially those who work on closed source products, do not quite understand what is happening. For them, open source is equivalent to “free work in their free time.”
For those of us who have spent the last decade creating a billion-dollar open-source software company, there’s nothing wrong with working in the open. The benefits and significance of such work are obvious: your reputation is already known to other companies. GitHub is a social network where your social capital, created with the help of your commits and contributions to global communication in any IT field in which you work, belongs only to you - it is not tied to the company in which you happen to work for some time.
Smart people will be able to take advantage of this: they will post patches, send questions and leave comments to the creators of languages and frameworks that they use every day in their work - TypeScript, .NET, Redux.
They will also strongly support the idea and creatively organize the majority of their work in the field of open source development - even if this is only a contribution to the development of private repositories.
GitHub can be called a great equalizer. You may not be able to get a job in Australia from India, but nothing prevents you from working with Australians from India using GitHub.
The way to get a job in the same Red Hat over the past decade is obvious. You start working with Red Hat developers about the task they are working on at the moment, and then when it becomes clear that you have made a significant contribution and have been able to show your best in the process, you get a chance to talk about the possibility of further Employment. Well, or they will contact you.
Now the same path is open to all, almost in any direction. As the open source code takes over the world, this trend is spreading everywhere.
In a recent interview with Linus Torvalds (49 thousand subscribers, 0 GitHub subscriptions), the creator of Linux and Git, spoke about it this way:
“You release a decent amount of small patches until the minteners start to trust you, after that you become more than just the guy who sends the patches, you are in a circle of trust.”
Your reputation is your place in the circle of trust. The more often you change companies, the weaker your reputation becomes, and sometimes it even gets lost. It's like, if you live in a small town for quite a long time, all the inhabitants of this city know you. And if you move from country to country, you end up somewhere where no one knows you - and even worse, no one knows anyone who knows you.
You have lost your primary and secondary, and perhaps even third-level connections. Until you create a brand, speaking at conferences or doing other significant things, the trust that you have built up, working with others and putting the code in the corporate internal repository will not appear.
However, if this work was done on GitHub, then it will not disappear anywhere. She is visible. This is the way to enter the circle of trust, which is visible to all.
One of the first things that will happen is that those who were previously deprived of opportunities will begin to benefit from it. Students, college graduates, immigrants. They will use this to move to Australia.
And it will change the whole picture. The once privileged developers will find that their circle of trust is lost. One of the principles of open source is meritocracy - the best idea wins, the best commit, the best testing, the best implementation, etc.
Of course, this method of evaluation is also imperfect (and indeed there is nothing perfect). And he does not relieve you of the responsibility of being a good person to work with. We fired several stellar Red Hat developers who didn’t get along with other employees — and then we saw these guys collaborating with other contributors on GitHub.
GitHub is not just a code repository and a list of raw commits, as some stereotypically imagine it. This is a social network. I would formulate as follows:
"What matters is not the presence of your code on GitHub, but what other people on GitHub are saying about your code, that's what matters."
This is something like a portable reputation. And over the next 12-24 months, while some developers will work on it, while others will not, this factor will become crucial. Let's draw an analogy. For example, there used to be dilemmas: have e-mail or not (now everyone has it), buy a mobile phone or not (now everyone has a mobile phone). In the end, the vast majority will work with open source, and this will become a situation in which everyone will have an equal chance of success.
But now the opportunity for a developer’s career growth will increasingly depend on GitHub.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/323320/
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